My Take On The Hullabaloo About Offshoring...

Every one I know, practically, is concerned about Offshoring. Offshoring, can be defined as relocation of business processes (including production/manufacturing) to a lower cost location. Offshoring can be seen in the context of either production offshoring or services offshoring. China has emerged as the preferred destination for production offshoring while India has emerged as the dominant player in the services offshoring domain. And well they should be. As evidenced in the media these days, Offshoring is the latest in a series of cost cutting measures adopted by businesses world wide. It is happening in the company that I work for in Houston in a BIG way. A lot of the Infrastructure support will be moved that way as well as 2d line support for the systems that I support as wellFirst to Kuala Lumpur and then to Bangalore, India. The team I work on was spared through 2005, but the O-Bomb is dropping all around us, creating empty craters in Cubeland. Most of our Customer Service type activities (and their support systems AP - AR) have already been moved north of the border. Nearshoring?? This means that most of the calls we take on a daily basis come from Canada. Other divisions are using places like Manila - for credit card processing. Although, it is beginning to look like what was not considered, is the fact that Americans can take the day to day stress of working in these kinds of jobs, the rest of the world is not quite used to the pace. The turnover rate is quite high...And with complicated software processing, the learning curve is quite high. This in turn, drives the cost of doing business higher, even in a lower cost market. Is it enough to turn back the tide, though? In some cases, yes. (Take Dell, for instance) In most cases, probably not. At least not until it starts to affect the bottom line. Or cycles back again. But what are these Highly paid, Highly trained hordes of offshored IT professionals to do? Try their hand at Consulting? Pardon me, but I think that ship has already sailed... So the question becomes: What, Mr Bush, - If offshoring is so good for US business, is intended to be done about all these formerly employed people whose jobs have flown the coup? We'll retrain them?? To do what, precisely? Most of these offshored, have already done their time in school. Should they retire? Most cannot. What will we do with the hundreds of thousands that are being thrown out of work? Four more years of this? That's just my opinion... Definition(s) taken from Brainyencylcopedia.